Twitter owner Elon Musk commented on Meta announcing it was setting rate limits on its new text-based platform, Threads, calling it “oppressive.”
Due to an increase in “spam attacks,” the company revealed it would be getting “tighter on things like rate limits,” Meta executive Adam Mosseri announced in a statement on Threads, a Twitter-rival social media platform.
Lmaooo
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 17, 2023
Copy 🐈
Within its first week, Threads was said to have reached over 100 million users, according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“Seems oppressive,” Musk commented on a Twitter user’s post of a photo showing that they had been rate limited on Threads.
Seems oppressive
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 17, 2023
Meta’s decision comes weeks after Twitter implemented a similar policy on July 1.
Twitter began limiting the amount of posts accounts could read each day. Accounts that had been verified were limited to being able to read “6000 posts/day” while accounts which were not been verified were limited to reading “600 posts/day.” More recent unverified accounts were only given a 300-post reading limit each day.
The rate limits were later raised by Musk to “8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified” accounts, according to a post from Musk.
“Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k,” Musk said in another post regarding the rate limits being increased for accounts.
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day
Musk said the decision to implement the “temporary limits” was part of an effort to “address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation.”
Twitter revealed in a blog post its decision to implement rate limits was to prevent spam accounts from “scraping people’s public Twitter data to build AI models” and to also stop the spam accounts from “manipulating people and conversation on the platform.”
The decision from Meta to implement rate limits on its site was also labeled as being a copycat move, Musk said in response to another user’s post regarding the decision from Threads.
Musk has previously accused Zuckerberg of copying Twitter. In a letter addressed to Zuckerberg, Musk threatened to sue Meta and alleged that Meta had “hired dozens of former Twitter employees” with the intention of “deliberately” using them to design and develop “Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app.”